# 2.2. Background of KDE

In October 1996, German LyX developer Matthias Ettrich initiated the development of KDE with a USENET posting. Soon after, a couple of interested developers began planning and programming parts of the new project. One year later, the window- and file-manager, the terminal emulator, the help system and the display configuration tool were released for ALPHA and Beta testing and proved to be relatively stable.

In July 1998, KDE 1.0 was released. It was the stable version for the next six months, while developers continued work on improving KDE without stability constraints. In January 1999, their improvements were consolidated and integrated to produce KDE 1.1, the new standard, stable version.

Developers and interested users communicate via several mailing lists as described in the Contacting the authors section. If you would like to help, please do so! We are still looking for helpers.